Chapter Text
B.
Octavia has been missing for fifteen days.
It’s the first thought in Bellamy’s head when he wakes up. Every morning, he tacks another day onto the steadily climbing number. He takes a minute to pray to a God he’s never believed in. Then he gets up and gets moving. He packs up his bedroll and his food and water—precious in this hellhole—into the beat-up truck he’d picked up a while ago, and he drives.
It’s been this way for a while, even before O disappeared. It was a similar routine; wake up, check perimeter, wake up Octavia, get her moving, and ignore her terrible morning attitude. He’d become an expert at siphoning gas within the first few weeks, learned to check every building (whether it be abandoned house, deserted supermarket, or desolate Starbucks) thoroughly before letting Octavia anywhere near it. He had a whole rulebook running through his head. Don’t talk to strangers, heartbeats or no. Check for hidden biters like you’re in a slasher movie. (They had a scare once involving a closet, and Bellamy decided he wasn’t interested in taking chances.) Every piece of food is valuable. That kind of thing. Only thing that’s really different now is the obvious emptiness of the passenger seat and the caustic worry twisting his gut.
An old picture of Octavia is stuck in the visor above his eyeline. It’s not the best one of her. She’s maybe fifteen and making a classic O stink face at the camera (he can vividly remember the moment he snapped it, her annoyed Quit it, Bell and the punch she’d thrown him). But it’s the only photo of her he’s got.
Octavia is alive. The information thrums in his head. She’s alive. She has to be. She isn’t among the dead—any of them (he knows, he checks their faces). She’s alive and she’s moving. A former plumber recognized her photo a few towns back.
“Yeah, I saw her,” the man said.
“Where?” Bellamy demanded.
He scratched at his head, where his hair has begun receding. “Few hundred miles back maybe?” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder.
Bellamy looked in that direction, but all he could see was bleak gray sky. “Was she alone?” he said. The man looked taken aback, probably at the urgency in Bellamy’s voice. He repeated it, low and snappish.
“No,” said the man. “No, she had friends.”
All Bellamy heard was strangers. He keeps driving. Octavia’s alive. He’ll find her, whatever it takes.
Bellamy really, really hates it when they’re kids.
Bellamy doesn’t see a lot of them, but he knows it happens often; when parents can’t make it, their kids don’t either. Most of them don’t have a clue how to survive alone, so they don’t last long. Although he has heard a rumor about a kid living with his undead parents in another room for a few months.
He’s wary of supermarkets. For all the lack of brain function, stiffs tend to know that people flock to them. They like to hang out in parking lots and produce aisles, sniffing at scents in the hopes of a meal. Bellamy hadn’t liked being forced to visit grocery stores even when Octavia was around, but he’s down to a pack of Slim Jims and three bottles of water and he doesn’t like being unprepared even more.
He’s shoving a box of granola bars into his pack when he hears a gurgle behind him, the telltale shuffle of feet. He swings around, gun raised—and stops. This one is so small; she probably doesn’t even reach his hip. Her brown hair is matted and bloody, but in two braids that were once neat. Bellamy’s chest feels tight. That means somebody had been taking care of her.
She’s missing half of her jaw, but he still sees Octavia when he looks at her. He remembers making her sit still for half an hour while he tried to master the French braid, determined to get around his clumsy fingers. He won’t waste bullets on this one. He can’t. He smashes her skull with one swing of the bat and hightails it out of there, resisting the urge to puke as he stomps on the gas.
Two days later, he spots a girl who is definitely not Octavia on the side of the road, surrounded by the walking dead. Sometimes he’s caught off-guard by wanderers and stiffs with long brown hair like O’s, girls with similar slim builds. Sometimes his heart will stutter, and he’ll have to steel himself, make sure it isn’t her. (It never is.)
This girl is built like Octavia, but she’s blonde. She actually looks like she’s doing okay; she’s got a machete and a gun and she is using them like she’s a veteran, like she’s a survivor. He wouldn’t have stopped except this girl stands at five-foot-nothing and she’s managed to attract a frenzy. He shouldn’t stop. It’s every man for himself out here. One girl isn’t worth his life, or Octavia’s.
But he stops. He supposes in O’s absence he needs someone to protect.
He takes out three zombies with a burst of bullets and then swoops in with his bat. The girl turns her gun on him in shock, but thankfully realizes he’s not a stiff. By the time they’re the only ones standing, though, their boots are covered in gore and they’re staring at each other like enemies.
It’s Bellamy who breaks first. “You’re by yourself,” he says. “In the middle of nowhere.”
“So are you,” says the girl. Her left hand is dripping blood, but she’s not showing any signs of pain. Even covered in sweat and grime, Bellamy can tell she’s not the kind of girl he would try hitting on pre-apocalypse. She’s pretty, the picture of a fairytale princess with gold hair and crisp blue eyes.
“Yeah,” he allows, “but I’ve got a car. And gas. And water.” He levels his gaze at her. “What do you have?”
The girl’s upper lip curls. “Dignity,” she says. “So you can get into your P.O.S. and drive on if you think I’m trading that for a sip of water and a can of Pringles.”
That catches Bellamy off-guard. He wasn’t—that wasn’t where he was going with this. But he knows girls have it harder in this world than guys like him, guys who’re armed and tall and able without laws or morals. He lowers his gun pointedly. “I don’t want your dignity,” he says carefully. “I want to help you.”
Confusion flickers in the girl’s blue blue eyes. Does she know what help means?
“I’m guessing you’re heading that way,” Bellamy says, nodding west. “So am I.” This doesn’t warrant a reaction, apparently, so he adds, “You’re the first living person I’ve seen in a few days. If you want, you can keep that gun on me the whole time.”
The girl considers him, and there’s something in her gaze that’s unnerving, sharp, dissecting. “If you touch me,” she says, “I’ll cut off your hand.” She sticks the gun in her pants and the machete in the pack slung across her back, then trudges past him towards his car like she owns it.
“Don’t worry about it, princess,” Bellamy says as he follows her. “I like my hand.”
C.
Clarke doesn’t trust this guy.
Okay, Clarke doesn’t trust anyone, but this guy especially. Maybe it’s the cleft in his chin, or the asshole humor that’s already evident in the first ten minutes. Or maybe it’s that he screeched to a stop in the middle of the road to rescue her out of the goodness of his heart. In Clarke’s experience, people don’t do that.
She keeps her gun on the seat next to her, straight in his eyeline. She doesn’t feel guilty. Men have become more lawless since the world went to shit. Clarke doesn’t like risk.
But she needs a ride to Oregon desperately, and for now this guy seems like her safest bet, considering her last one had gone to Toyota heaven a couple miles back and she can’t just hack her way through the wave of zombies standing between her and Oregon. Between her and her mom.
She fights the wave of worry and uncertainty that overcomes her. She has refused to think anything other than her mother is alive. Abby Griffin is the most resourceful person on the planet; if Clarke’s survived, her mother has to have built a fortress and become queen of it already. Clarke just needs to get there.
The driver clears his throat. “So I’m—”
Clarke cuts him off. “It’s probably better that we don’t exchange names,” she says. “Don’t want to get attached.” She makes sure to put a little emphasis on the last word.
The guy’s eyebrow quirks, but he doesn’t make a smartass comment like she expects. “What should I call you, then?” he asks. How he can sound amused during the motherfucking apocalypse, Clarke has no idea.
Anything is preferable to princess, but… “Abby,” she says at last. She looks at him hard. “And you?”
He’s quiet for a minute. “Gus,” he says. “You can call me Gus.” Somehow Clarke’s comforted by the fact that he’s lying, too.
The guy won’t stop tapping the steering wheel with his fingers. It’s irritating. There doesn’t even seem to be a pattern to it—it’s not a song, at least. Just this irksome little taptaptaptap. She wants to tell him to stop, but doesn’t. She can live with it, and there’s no reason to be irritable.
Gus is actually a pretty efficient driver. He keeps a weather eye on the gas tank as they go, stops only once to pull gas from an SUV on the side of the highway. (Clarke once rode with this girl who liked to run over zombies. What a waste of gas.) He’s pretty trusting, leaving her in the car alone. Maybe he doesn’t think of her as a threat. That’s a little disheartening.
Clarke’s height seems to be her biggest obstacle. People typically see her as doll-like and fragile—that’s been her life. Half her time is spent proving them wrong. It’s gotten a little easier to do that after she learned the exact amount of strength and pressure it takes to behead a biter. Fragile. As if.
Gus seems to have gotten the message that Clarke doesn’t want to talk, so he keeps silent. He doesn’t even flick on the radio, which is great because she’s got three books in her pack and this one demands silence.
At one point a flutter of paper distracts her from the small print. It’s a photograph of a pretty girl, young and fresh-faced, scowling at the camera. Gus is quick to snatch it out of Clarke’s hand.
“Who is she?” Clarke asks out of mild (mild) curiosity.
“My sister,” Gus replies tightly.
“Is she dead?” It’s insensitive, maybe, but pleasantries went out the window a long time ago. It’s a little disturbing for Clarke to know that she’s not the same person she used to be, not by a long shot. If the virus hadn’t broken out, she’d still be living with her dad in New York City, carting around stacks of biology and chemistry books and attending classes with Wells. But she doesn’t like to think about that.
Gus gives her a cold half-smile. “No names, no tragic backstories, either,” he says. He adds, “Princess” out of pettiness.
Clarke doesn’t say anything. She can respect that. His answer makes her think that that little girl is dead or wandering, anyway. Most people are.
When the sun dips below the horizon, Gus pulls over. Clarke, who’d been half-dozing, looks at him sharply, suddenly wide awake. “Why are we stopping?”
The corner of his mouth angles upwards. “Gotta sleep sometime, princess.”
Clarke refrains from making an irritated noise. “I can drive.”
She can see that he considers it for a second. He looks at her—really looks at her—thoughtfully, at what she hopes is the stoic look on her face. Then he says, “No can do. Best wait till light.” He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “You can sleep back there.”
She looks. There’s a pillow and a couple of blankets, plus an impressive amount of gear. She can see a couple of thick parkas and hoodies, sneakers and rolled-up socks, plus a bag of what she assumes is more clothes. It’s more than enough for one person. That means Gus’s sister has only been gone recently. “Where are you sleeping?” she asks.
“Right here.” He shoves a hand behind his seat and pushes it back so that he’s in a slightly more comfortable position than before. It looks to Clarke like he’ll wake up with the worst muscle cramps in history.
But she shrugs and clambers into the backseat. What does she care? She covers herself in the mess of blankets, not even hesitating to push her face into the pillow (she can’t even remember the last time she saw one). It smells unwashed, but surprisingly not unpleasant. Her gaze settles on the back of Gus’s head, which is leaned back against the headrest. Is this what he smells like? Or what his sister does?
She pushes the questions away. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he stays in his spot and she stays in hers, and that they both live. But she stares at the tense nape of his neck until she falls asleep.
B.
When he wakes up, he almost forgets he’s not alone. Day Sixteen, he thinks, rolling his head against the hard knot of muscle in his neck. Similar knots ache in his lower back and thighs. He catches sight of O’s picture, thinks, Small sacrifices. A soft snore from the back freezes him before he remembers his hitchhiker.
He twists to take in the sight of the sleeping girl. He imagines the backseat as a bed, her clothes as a gown, tiara glinting in her hair. He really hit the nail on the head with that nickname. She looks different like this, face slack and calm, unguarded and smooth.
Very slowly, he opens the driver’s side door and steps out, sweeping the area for any sign of the undead. He thinks he sees staggering figures in the distance, but they’re far enough away that he considers it safe. They’re slow as hell, anyway.
It’s not cold, but still cool. Bellamy welcomes the touch of the air to his overheated body. He stretches, feeling the pleasant pull of muscle and pop of joints. When he glances back, the girl is still asleep. Abby. He wonders if, like him, she picked the name of somebody she cared about.
Octavia would’ve gotten a kick out of what he called himself. Gus like Augustus, the original Octavia’s older brother, whose real name actually was Octavian before rising to power. He misses telling stories like that. He misses history books. He misses college.
He rolls his shoulders one more time. He hates being cramped up in the car. He hated road trips as a kid. He taps on the window lightly, watches Abby jerk awake. It looks like she’s forgotten too, because she stares at him in confusion for half a second. Then her face settles into the same façade as yesterday.
Here we go, Bellamy thinks.
The last time Bellamy saw Octavia, she was pissed at him. Technically this isn’t atypical O behavior nowadays, but it was a particularly high level of pissed. Like Bellamy-can’t-even-get-a-word-in pissed.
“Dammit, Bell,” she’d ended with. “Can’t you just humor me for a fucking second?”
He’d been focused on the meat he was roasting for fear he’d roll his eyes at his explosive sister. Then he’d really be in trouble. (Okay, it wasn’t like she didn’t have a point. But he wouldn’t say that.) “No,” he said stubbornly. “There’s no such thing as a safe haven, O. This thing?” He shook his head. “It’s everywhere.”
This seemed to wound his baby sister, which really wasn’t his intention. (If you know one thing about Bellamy Blake, it’s got to be that he’d rather cut off a hand than watch Octavia suffer even for a second.) She didn’t retort, just stood up and stormed off with a barely audible “Unbelievable” thrown his way.
He’d decided to let her have a minute to cool off. He’d make it up to her. He just didn’t want her hopes to get too high, because he was sure they’d be crushed. He hadn’t believed the safe haven rumor the second he heard it, but she had latched onto it. She has too big of a heart, he’d thought sadly.
He’d gone after her when he decided she’d been gone too long. But he didn’t find Octavia; he found a herd of zombies. He killed as many as he could, but it was no use. The more he screamed O’s name, the more of the dead came to answer. She was gone. The best he can tell, she had to run in one direction, and he in another. Stupid, stupid, stupid. In the twenty-four hours afterwards, all he could think were his mother's words: Your sister. Your responsibility.
He realizes he’s gripping the wheel too hard at the memory. Slowly, he loosens his grip. If the girl—Abby—notices, she doesn’t say.
“Mind if I ask where you’re headed?” he says to fill the silence if nothing else.
The girl raises her head, mouth set in that guarded way again. “Oregon,” she says vaguely.
“Why?”
His eyes are on the road, but he can see the critical glint of her eyes in his peripheral vision. She’s trying to decide if he’s trustworthy enough, probably. “My mom is there,” she tells him.
“What about your dad?”
Bellamy knows better than anybody that family questions are annoying and unwanted. But he’s curious.
“I thought you said no tragic backstories,” she says stiffly.
Bellamy suppresses a smile. “Yeah, I did say that.”
Abby glares at him, but he doesn’t offer anything else.
A couple of days later and Bellamy has learned a total of four things about the girl in the passenger seat. First, she hates being called princess. It’s funny that she doesn’t see how fitting it is for her and her upturned nose. So he keeps using it.
(“Pass the salt, princess.” So what if it’s the fifth time he’s said it?
She glares at him, but chooses to say, “What salt?”
That’s when he remembers he’s eating a Twinkie. If Octavia were here she’d punch him.)
Second, she’s stronger than she looks. (They stop to scavenge an empty house. Bellamy pauses at the front door and says habitually, “Wait here.”
Halfway down the hallway he realizes Abby is right behind him. She catches the lone zombie in the throat with her machete and severs its neck in the second whack.
She raises her eyebrows at him, daring him to say something. He doesn’t.)
Third, she likes to read. At first he thought it was just to tune out his presence even though he doesn’t say anything, but she always takes a minute to get back to reality, so it seems like she’s engrossed.
(In that same house he discovers her in the master bedroom picking out a few books reverently. One of them is Julius Caesar.
“‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,’” says Bellamy in a deep voice. Abby eyes him in mild surprise and he grins. “We’re not all stupid,” he tells her.
“No,” she agrees. “But you all say that.” She turns away smiling when he realizes she trapped him in that one.)
Third, she refuses to sleep until she absolutely has to. A few times he recognizes the internal battle she has with sleep, even if it’s just dozing. It occurs to him that that’s how much she distrusts him.
(“You can sleep in my presence, you know,” he says once.
“I’m not tired,” she replies stubbornly.
He’s pretty sure she waits until he’s out cold before she actually relaxes.)
It’s funny how four tiny things can actually give an insight of who someone is.
C.
Clarke is determined to dehumanize Gus as much as possible.
It’ll be easier that way, she’s sure, to split when the time comes. So she lets all the negative thoughts run free. He’s irritating. Nominated for the Asshole of the Year award. She’ll be glad to be rid of him. She definitely doesn’t feel comfort at the proximity of another human being. She definitely doesn’t feel the prick of curiosity when he makes a mention of the pre-apocalypse days. She definitely doesn’t feel warm she walks in on him shirtless, bending into the bathtub in an abandoned house to let the stuttering steam of water wash over his hair.
(He shakes his head like a dog, spraying water everywhere, and catches sight of her in the doorway. “Enjoying the view, princess?”
She definitely won’t miss that grin. Or the nickname. She doesn’t have a sufficient comeback, so she just says, “Don’t call me that” and makes her exit.)
She’ll probably be better off on her own anyway. When they part ways, she can steal another car, forge her own, be in Oregon sooner because she won’t stop at night. (It’s a courtesy, she decides, not to put up a fight about that.) She realizes she has no idea when that’ll happen. Gus has never mentioned where he’s going or who he’s going to, if there’s anyone.
But Clarke is finding it harder and harder to think of Gus as a soulless asshole. Once she sees him smash in the skull of a zombie with the bat and scowl down at the mess. Clarke thinks first about how violent he looks, how violent they all look. Then she wonders when she stopped feeling nauseous at sights like these.
Gus surprises her by saying, “If I get bitten, you have to kill me.”
She blinks. “What?”
He’s already turning away. “I won’t become one of those things,” he says, voice steady. “You have to kill me.”
Clarke realizes she’d want the same done for her. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, me too.” She trots after him, not sure what to name the heavy feeling in her chest.
Clarke almost shoots the man coming out of the gas station bathroom. He doesn’t seem quite so startled to see her.
“Watch it, sweetheart,” he says.
Clarke frowns at him, says nothing back. She moves to go into the bathroom, but he steps in her path. “Whoa,” he grins. “Not even a hello? It’s not every day you see someone with a beating heart.”
She hopes he can see the distaste in her face.
“Abby?”
Gus is standing behind her. He takes one look at the man and his face hardens.
“It’s fine,” Clarke finds herself saying. “We were just being…polite.”
Gus comes to stand at Clarke’s side, evidently not accepting it. He’s holding his bat at an angle that is neither threatening nor passive, but still tense. “Go,” he says to Clarke.
She angles an eyebrow, but he doesn’t look at her. The man is grinning faintly, looking down at Gus—he’s taller, broader. But Clarke hurries into the bathroom, deciding she’ll have the quickest pee of her life. The bathroom is disgusting, and it’s evident someone died in here. But Clarke yanks down her pants and goes.
When she comes back out, the man is blocking her view of Gus.
“Have you seen her or not?” Gus is saying impatiently.
“Well, I don’t know,” says the man in amusement. “Let me see.” Clarke skirts him to see he’s holding a small square of paper—the picture of Gus’s sister. So he thinks she’s alive. “Cute,” the man comments with a grin. He spies Clarke and his grin widens. “Little young for you, eh? What do you want with her when you have this one here?” He nods at Clarke.
Gus bristles. “Asshole,” Clarke snaps, before he can.
The man laughs. “Fiery.” He lets the photo flutter into the dust. “I haven’t seen the little bitch.”
Anger takes over Gus’s face, and he throws a punch. The man catches it. “Punk,” he snarls. He shoves Gus.
Clarke steps in between them and punches the man in the throat. He wasn’t expecting it; he chokes, staggering, and Clarke kicks him in the groin. She stoops to scoop up the photo and tugs on Gus’s arm. “Let’s go,” she hisses.
He jolts into movement on the second tug. They leave the station in a cloud of burnt rubber. “Thanks for that,” Gus says gruffly, like he doesn’t say it often.
Clarke reaches out to place the photo on the dashboard. “You think she’s alive,” she says.
Gus’s hands curl hard around the steering wheel. “I know she is,” he says.
Clarke doesn’t say anything else. And if she sees Gus reverently holding the photo later with hunched shoulders, she doesn’t say anything about that, either.
Clarke’s rummaging through the chip aisle of the supermarket when it comes up behind her, unusually quiet for something without much brains left. She hears it mumble, says irritably, “Not now, Gus.” Then she realizes: not Gus.
She whirls around, reaching for the machete in her pack, but she doesn’t have enough room to draw it—and the thing is closing in fast. It was a woman when alive, a brunette about as tall as her. Now it’s rotting while standing, and determined to sink its teeth into Clarke’s flesh. Clarke kicks it back as she pulls out her gun. She makes the mistake of shoving it again with her hand. It turns its face—everything slows down—and goes straight for her wrist. Clarke thinks, This is it.
The biter’s head tips up sharply, yanked into staring straight up at the ceiling. There’s a gunshot, and then Clarke’s blinking against the sudden wetness on her face. The biter collapses, a new wound in its forehead, and Gus kicks it away grimly.
Clarke touches her face. Her fingers come away covered in blackish blood and brain. Gus grabs her arm and yanks up her sleeve. It might just be her imagination, but he breathes a little easier when he finds nothing but smooth, pale skin. He reaches one hand up, and she thinks he’s about to offer his sleeve, but he just gestures at her face. “Don’t let it get in your mouth or eyes,” he tells her.
Clarke’s stunned. She’d never had an encounter that close before. “I thought I told you I’d chop your hand off if you touched me,” she says, dazed.
Gus keeps hold of her arm for a second longer in clear defiance before he releases her. “Somehow, princess,” he says, “I don’t think you’ll deliver.”
Clarke cleans up in one of the employee bathrooms while Gus waits outside. She checks for hidden biters, but even when she knows the room’s empty she leaves the door open. She looks at herself in the mirror, face clean and a little raw from her scrubbing, and thinks she sees Gus watching her over her shoulder before he becomes interested in the rotten produce in front of him.
But it might just be her imagination.
B.
Bellamy dreams, as usual, about Octavia.
She is small in his dreams, never older than eleven. And she is always smiling. This time, she’s an infant. She looks up at Bellamy with her glittering little eyes and clutches his index finger in her miniature fist and Bellamy imagines her holding his heart in that tiny hand. He thinks in a furtive haze, I love you I love you I love you I won’t let anything happen to you. He bends to kiss her forehead and she smells like babies always do. But when he straightens up, she has turned an alarming shade of mottled gray. And when he touches her, her new skin is hard as stone. He lets out a startled yelp, and Octavia crumbles to dust.
He jolts awake, heart slamming against his ribs. He fumbles shakily for the picture of O and squints at it in the dark, just barely making out her face. She’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive, he chants to himself. Very slowly, his heart rate calms and the ache in his chest dulls a little.
A high-pitched whimper startles him. Again, he’d forgotten the girl asleep in the backseat. He twists to look at her. She’s balled up so tightly she looks tiny, her face screwed up in anguish, her fist at her mouth. She’s having a nightmare, too, and judging by her pained muttering (“Please…”), hers is worse.
Bellamy shifts in his seat, puts one knee in it and the other on the armrest so he can plant his hands on the backseat. He reaches out and grasps Abby’s arm firmly. “Hey,” he says loudly. He shakes her. “Hey, wake up. Wake up.”
Her blue eyes flash open, and she flinches away from him. He freezes, waits until she catches her breath. “Sorry,” he says.
“No,” she says, and her voice is uneven. Small. She swipes at something glittering on her cheek. “Thanks for…you know.”
He slowly shifts back into the driver’s seat. “I’ll tell you about mine if you tell me about yours,” he offers, because hey, he’s curious to know what princesses dream about.
She looks at him critically. There it is again, that guarded look. But it falls away as quickly as it appears. “I was dreaming about my dad,” she admits. “He turned about a month ago. I had to…” She looks away.
Bellamy feels a surge of sympathy. “I was dreaming about my sister,” he tells her. “She turned to stone when I touched her.”
Abby levels her gaze at him. “I’m sorry,” she says genuinely.
“Yeah,” says Bellamy. “Yeah, me too.”
It’s raining so hard that Bellamy can’t even see out the windshield, even with the wipers on. He can barely discern that they’re in a residential area, that outside tiny birdhouses line up along the block. He thinks about keeping up, but decides against it. Not worth it.
Abby is asleep in the passenger seat. It’s odd. She never so much as closes her eyes unless she’s a good few feet away from him. Does this mean she trusts him? Somehow he doubts it. He’s careful when he reaches toward her and prods her arm. “Abby, wake up.”
She does so slowly, blinking several times at him as she sits up. Bellamy wonders what it’s like to see his face first thing in the morning. (Afternoon, whatever.) “What is it?” she asks groggily.
“This,” Bellamy waves a hand at the obscured windshield, “is way too heavy. We should wait it out in one of those.” He points at the houses that flash in and out of wavy vision.
Abby is silent for a minute. He’s gleaned that she thinks stopping for anything other than supplies is a waste of time. He wonders what’s really waiting for her in Oregon. Is she lying about her mother? He shakes himself. What does he care?
“Okay,” she says finally, which surprises him.
Bellamy grabs a few water bottles and the almost-empty box of granola bars and wraps them up in one of the hoodies. He gives the other one to Abby, who knots her hair in a misshaped bun before pulling the hood over it. Bellamy doesn’t bother with the parkas. They’re for cold, not rain, and he doesn’t want them getting damp and moldy. He doesn’t want Octavia wearing anything damp or moldy.
They make a beeline for the nearest house. Bellamy manages to kick in the door (it hurts even though the wood’s old), but Abby darts inside before he can stop her. (That’s not panic in his chest, is it?) He mutters a curse and ducks in after her.
They carefully check every room. Abby finds a decomposing body in one of the bedrooms (the smell tells all) and comes out of it with her brows shoved together. She shakes her head at Bellamy when he tries to edge by. “You don’t want to see it,” she says, firmly shuts the door behind her.
Bellamy is faintly surprised. No one’s ever tried to shield him from something hard to look at, and she’s the last person he ever… He shakes himself, but he doesn’t try entering the room.
It wasn’t more than a minute in the rain, but Bellamy’s soaked and Abby’s hair is dripping steadily when she unties it. She peels off the wet jacket with a frown, but Bellamy doesn’t follow her example. It’s cold as hell, but he’ll manage.
He scrounges up a box of matches and lights one of the burners on the gas stove. Abby comes over immediately to hold her hands over the flame. Bellamy has the urge to grab it.
There are stale chips, a few cans of beans, cereal, and a little vodka in the cabinets. Bellamy can’t remember the last time he had a drink, but he puts the bottle aside. As far as meals go after the apocalypse, it’s not bad. They decide to save the cereal for the morning. Abby sets the cans on separate burners. Bellamy wanders into the rest of the house for a closer look. There’s toothpaste in the bathroom, along with an unopened pack of seven toothbrushes—score. Also, a bunch of pill bottles lining the shelf behind the mirror. He doesn’t dare look at the names. The big bedroom is full of women’s clothing, but nothing that’ll fit Abby. Everything’s either too big or too small. Bellamy has a feeling that the body she found was a child.
The bed is the best part. A real bed, with a mattress and everything. The sheets smell a little musty, but clean. Bellamy wants to stretch out on it, but he’s still very wet.
There’s a jewelry box with a glass window in the lid on the vanity. The glass is broken in big pieces, but the jewelry is there. Bellamy’s already reaching in, thinking Octavia would like that necklace before he remembers that she probably wouldn’t want some dead woman’s jewelry. He pulls back too fast; one of the jagged pieces cuts into his palm. He curses.
He heads back to the kitchen, where Abby is staring morosely at the cans. He tells her what he found, and she brightens visibly.
“Soap?” she asks hopefully.
“Yeah,” Bellamy says, “but no running water.”
The hope dies. “Damn,” she mutters, turning back.
He finds a dishtowel on the countertop and dabs at the stinging cut. It’s pretty long and pretty deep. He sort of wants to mention that he doesn’t think Abby smells bad at all, but he doesn’t. He remembers then, as he glances at Abby’s wet hair and the tiny pool around her feet, that they’re both pretending to be different people. Or she is, at least.